Portfolio

Over the years, on the job and on the side, I have created, co-created and contributed to a wide range of initiatives and resources. Across a broad range of sectors and organisations, projects I support and lead focus on three main areas:

• How to upgrade our collective operating systems, from the micro to the macro, with particular focus on technology, culture and governance.  

• How to broaden individual and collective meaning making, to uncover and evolve the narratives, ethics and mental models that guide our action.

• How to deepen our sense of community in organisations and other groups, to foster collaboration, wellbeing, and resilience.  

You can find a non-exhaustive selection below. I’ve listed books, articles, websites, manuals and workshop formats, together with businesses and communities.

Upgrading our operating systems - Technology, Culture, Governance

We live in a period of rapid transition between economic, technological, and geopolitical systems. We face the risk of collapse at all levels. We also have a chance to create unprecedented abundance. What our world ends up looking like will largely depend on our capacity to better organise collective action. Meaning, a shift in power structures hard and soft: institutions, protocols, and narratives.

The contemporary tangle of global challenges - from environmental destruction to technological convergence and cultural fragmentation - has come to be known as the meta crisis. Working on anything else seems futile, and so much is enmeshed that it’s relevant everywhere. I engage with the metacrisis by producing frameworks and thinking tools to better understand the overlap of technology, culture and governance. I also support initiatives large and small that engage with the meta crisis, directly or indirectly, and offer hope to shift the dial by enabling different ways of organising ourselves.

Slow Internet - a Manifesto for better technology

Slow Internet is the first in a series of FOGA projects. Merging the slow movement with the untapped promise of the early Internet, the authors - governance futurist Corin Ism and altruistic hacker Markus Amalthea Magnuson - articulate three design principles, plenty of concrete examples, a vibe and a vision, adding up to an exit path from the Stressed Internet of today. Synthesising ideas from discourses surrounding surveillance capitalism, privacy advocacy, platform cooperativism and AI alignment, Slow Internet suggests a relationship with technology where intentionality is front and centre. This short Manifesto hopes to ignite a global movement that embraces what adds actual value to our lives . I wrote the French Translation - available soon - and am the French language spokesperson for the movement.

Future of Governance Agency - 21st C. governance Literacy

In 2019, I co-founded the Future of Governance Agency. FOGA is a cooperative think tank that aims to build governance literacy in the public and its institutions, through communication, upskilling and original research.

With founder Corin Ism, I am the co-author of two major books scheduled for completion in 2025. Libtech explores the potential of new technology for human liberation. How to Rule a World offers an introduction to existing and emerging tools for power and governance. I more generally support the work of FOGA through ongoing personal and editorial support.

Global Carbon Reward - A new coin to fund climate action

The Global Carbon Reward is a revolutionary policy proposal for funding climate mitigation, ecosystem protection, and climate justice. The Global Carbon Reward proposes to establish a new central-bank backed transnational currency to fund global decarbonisation efforts. It serves as a major element in Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest optimistic sci-fi novel Ministry for the Future. The originator, Dr Delton Chen, has presented GCR in a broad range of global policy and industry forums, including COP28 to the Bank of England and the Yale podcast.
I’ve been an adviser to GCR since 2020, & edited various versions of the website and policy paper.

Chinese statecraft - exploring dynamic constraints

There is no progress on global peace, technological, or environmental challenges, without deep and meaningful engagement with China. What influence can anyone outside China exert, so that it is more likely to act as a benevolent actor in its rise to global power? I worked with author Jean as development editor from 2021 to 2023 in the research and writing of this monograph. Our ambition was to provide an accessible yet accurate introduction to the exercise of power in contemporary China, anchored in an understanding of the long tradition. At a time of so much grandstanding, often anchored in ignorance, simplistic thoughts, and prejudice, this is an important work of nuance and intelligence. You can buy the book, or read the introduction chapter ‘China through the looking glass’ for free.

Entrepreneurs & IncubaTors - birthing a different future

Nobody will change the world on their own. We need many people to do many different things. Yet we do need different things to happen, and one avenue for this is the development of new ventures. This is why I have a commitment to supporting founders, and organisations that assist them. Since 2017, I have worked with Insight Academy of Innovation and Entrepreneurship to embed design thinking into their business curriculum, and more generally assist their students in dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity. Earlier, in 2015, I joined the founding team of the China Australia Millennial Project – Australia’s largest bilateral innovation incubator. I curated the selection of 130 leading young leaders from Australia and China aged 19 to 35, and coordinated the operations of a 6-day summit in Sydney, with particular attention to fostering a supportive culture among the team and cohort through a set of Day-1 activities.

Capture your vision - clear messaging for a better world

Shifting the dial requires a large number of concrete actions, which in turn require various organisation to try and do things differently. I support founders and visionaries in their attempt to create new ventures that contribute to shifting the paradigm, and offer hope against the cynical status quo. I particularly assist them in contextualising their work and finding personal clarity - why me, why now? Projects I have supported include the Fab9 Maker Space, sharing economy & inventory app Counta, AI-powered bill automation platform AYLA, impact evaluation platform isgood.ai, greentech startup reVolt, financial market analysis platform Neveus, second-hand marketplace & fundraising platform Charity Bay, cybersecurity start-up Spritecloud, impact investment and international development company Future Value, disability housing developer Eternus, organizational design practice Kikyu, self-awareness & emotional intelligence community the Self-Club, entrepreneurship Edtech venture School of Future, and AI-enabled social health platform Weaver.  

The art of relating - ecosystem stewardship

To transform systems, some of us need to operate in-between. We need connectors and shape-shifters to work across projects and build bridges between the current world and the new. But how do you build a life in-between? Our default model, with each person holding one role in one organisation, is itself part of the problem.

This line of questioning had been a long bugbear of mine, when I met Luea Ritter through a common friend. Her work with Collective Transitions, the World Ethic Forum or supporting the Climate Youth Negotiators at COP echoed my own practice in-between. So much so that editorial support for a series of articles turned into a joint book project on ‘ecosystem stewardship’ - currently underway.

This work is inspired by ongoing interest in the commons, open source movements, or exopreneurship. An early personal reflection on this topic was published in a collective publication on Inclusive Innovation. Here is a link to this personal meditation on in-between entrepeneurship.

Individual and Collective Meaning Making - Stories, Ethics, Character

We live in a time of civilizational transition. As individuals, we must navigate increasing levels of ambivalence and uncertainty. In a world that is changing so fast, what should we take into consideration to make the right decisions? What character should we cultivate? What stories should we believe in? What matters in our personal and professional worlds? What’s a good life?

At its core, meaning is about connection. It’s experiencing a thought, a word, a project, a narrative, or an identity as linked to something beyond itself. It’s weaving self and collective, past and future, global and local, to deepen our sense of presence. Yet common ground is eroding fast, with a rift between local endeavours anchored in the status quo to such an extent that they lose all transformative ambition, and global visions so disconnected from the concrete that they become a pure spectacle. Against this background of chaos, I try to make sense of my own brain, and assist others in making sense of theirs, in a quest for meaning. I do so through writing, workshops and conversations, across language and other media, alone or in company.

Julienleyre.me - Moral reflections across Cultures

I keep a regular writing practice on my personal blog, julienleyre.me. I write about a range of topics, with particular focus on virtues and values - often in the form of series. Cardinal virtues: Exploring the four virtues of prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude through reflection and practice. The seven deadly sins: A series of posts reflecting on the seven deadly sins from the Catholic tradition. Confucian virtues: Exploring the five virtues  of Confucianism, 仁，义，礼，智， 信, practice and reflection informed by a close reading of the Analects. Buddhist virtues: Exploring virtues in the Buddhist tradition, metta, uphekka, Mudita, Karuna. On Change: Interrogating aspects of transformation. Corona-thoughts: Reflecting on the pandemic and its impact. Through this work, I was invited to publish in literary magazine Meanjin. ‘Who Should Die and What Should We Do with the Bodies’ is a series of aphorisms exploring virtue ethics in a time of crisis.

Landscape your life - the art of sensing potential futures

Follow your passion, trust your gut, and do what you really want”. That message is all very good, but what if I’m not sure what I want? What if I’m after something original, and new? What if it falls out of the box, and I can feel it, but I don’t have the words to describe it? Taking an original path – let’s call it freedom – is impossible unless we’re willing to live in a state of uncertainty, temporary discomfort, until the right idea – your goal, your desire –emerges, and finds its proper shape. This demands a certain type of strength, a certain type of emotional and intellectual core muscle.

Landscape your life is a short coaching program designed specifically to build that muscle. It proposes a method to get in touch with your desire for the future, and a set of tools that you can use at your own pace to capture, refine and crystallise what you want your future professional life to be.      

Eternus global - philosophy AND the corporate world

From 2023 to 2024, I worked as Philosopher in Residence with an atypical business group called Eternus. In this role, I supported various generations of executive leaders as the organisation found its shape across different structures and strategic directions - from incubators to creative and technology - eventually settling on two core pillars of property development and wealth management.

Over this period, my first in a corporate environment, I explored the role of philosopher not as a specialist but a generalist agent responsible for ‘the space in-between’, connecting the parts, exploring ‘what might be’, and improving information integrity. I wrote a philosopher in residence white paper as a sort of blueprint for the role, and a different way to work in emerging organisations. Feel free to adopt it - or please contact me for more details.

SolarPunk Futures - imagining a world of abundance

When engaging with aspects of the meta crisis - and particularly when working on global catastrophic risk - it’s easy to fall into doom and gloom. Yet merely focusing on preventing collapse gives us limited energy to do the work ahead. Could we not anchor some of those efforts into positive visions instead? And what would those look like? This is the gist of the SolarPunk movement - a latest incarnation of sci-fi imagination, offering visions of an abundant eco-conscious world, a sort of global Wakanda powered by wearable solar cells. I wrote with Corin Ism on this new narrative and aesthetic trend for Singularity University and the Dhaka Tribune. Solar Punk is also a key source of inspiration for Liberation Tech - the untapped potential to reclaim technology for freedom - a book I’m co-authoring with Corin through FOGA, scheduled for completion in 2025.

What is a Story? - Unpacking narrative construction   

I have long been fascinated by stories, both as audience, and as a producer. I was a voracious reader as a child, but also watched considerable amounts of movies and TV. This has continued to this day. I’ve dabbled in storytelling, as a novelist, short-story writer, film-maker, and as part of public presentations. I’ve also used stories as a tool of self-discovery. In 2012-2013, I co-hosted 'What's the moral of this', a monthly storytelling event for non-native speakers of English exploring implicit ethical judgements revealed through personal narratives. In 2021, I conducted a parallel practice with my virtue buddy Patrick Laudon. Over the course of a year, we wrote 10 short stories each, following standard plots, in an exploration of genre. (More recently, I encountered the same sources of genre in the remarkable AI-book Literary Theory for Robots.) I have put together a little booklet summarising what is a story. It’s presented here in beta version - with a proper laid out version TBC.

LGBTIQ rom-com - the writer as community builder.

In 2011, I published a piece in the Emerging Writer titled ‘Writing on the walls, or the writer as community builder’. This was inspired by my work at the intersection of storytelling and LGBTIQ community building. In 2005, I coordinated and co-wrote Regardez moi dans les yeux, the first French language short story collection offering positive models for LGBTIQ teenagers. I then proceeded to write and publish Mehmet et Philippe ou les surprises de l’amour, a gay young adult rom-com. In Australia, I wrote and directed Honeypot, an award-winning short-film which received 4.5 million views on Youtube, and organised the mixed-media exhibition Love Journeys, stories of LGBTIQ migration to Australia. All those projects are variations on the rom com genre - for which I have a lasting interest, as a rich alternative to conflict narratives, and a possible source of inspiration in solving systemic problems.

School of Slow media - mindful media across ASEAN

The School of Slow Media is a global leadership program for creatives, change makers and everyday leaders that want to develop a more mindful, collaborative and creative practice. Their 3-day REMIX program immerses participants in human-centred storytelling— a methodology where mindfulness, peaceful dialogue and design thinking are essential parts of the process. After supporting the 2015 Phnom Penh pilot, I joined the team in 2017 for the design and facilitation of the Manila REMIX. During the COVID-19 lockdown, the School of Slow Media ran a digital listening gym for their communities, which I co-facilitated in 2021, and later adopted as a model for community building in organisational contexts.

My understanding of storytelling as an act of peace-making is deeply inspired by their work.

Marco Polo Magazine - Chinese writing for western readers

In 2011, I founded Marco Polo Project, an organisation that aims to develop new common cultural practices for people living across cultures and geographies. Our first large-scale initiative was a digital magazine bringing new voices from China to readers across the world. I curated an editorial line that brought together established and emerging intellectuals and social commentators to reflect the state of cultural, sociological and philosophical conversations on the Chinese blogosphere. In addition, I coordinated the efforts of a distributed volunteer translation community. Our magazine fed into Danwei Media (now supChina) as a weekly column, the '1510 digest', offering a unique window into conversations happening in China’s digital sphere, and informed contributions to ANU-Centre for China in the World’s publication, The China Story. In 2014, we curated a world-first bilateral festival of digital literature, exploring the new ways we share stories online across the Chinese and English-speaking virtual worlds. In 2022, I wrote a series of reflections on running Marco Polo Project.

Language learning - a school of mental flexibility

As a European polyglot, I am particularly attuned to the role of language in shaping identities and belonging. This fascination with language as humanity’s greatest social and intellectual tool has led me to an early career in linguistics at Paris Sorbonne University. Over the years, I have tutored and lectured on languages and translation at universities in France, China, Japan and Australia, and supported digital language learning tools as advisor and beta tester, including Hacking Chinese, Italki, FluentU. As a language educator, my main interest lies in language education as a school of emotional and intellectual self-awareness – and exploring ways of training the non-linguistic aspects of language education, as a way to prompt greater social, emotional and cognitive flexibility.

A deeper sense of Community - Hosting Inclusive Spaces

We live in a period of rapid change. In the meta crisis, our personal and professional lives are anything but predictable. People are migrating en masse, and will continue to do so. AI is transforming the structures of our brains, and our sense of reality.

In the face of so many shifts in our identities and solidarity networks, we need collective structures that can act as shock absorbers, in companies, neighbourhoods, learning institutions, and informal ‘communities’, fleeting or established. For this, we need the mindsets and methods to constantly redefine what is our common world, common knowledge, common language, common sense, and common goals. I lead and support projects to nurture such welcoming, resilient and fertile environments.

How things happen - redesigning organisations

There is continuity between micro and the macro. Building global coherence involves local work within organisations. Not to mention, if we want a chance to see paradigm-shifting ventures come to life, we need the structures enabling them to work. In 2021, with Lifecrack Asia founder Patrick Laudon, I co-created the School of Decision Making a digital program offering a systematic framework to design and implement better collective decision-making models. Since then, we’ve conducted ongoing reflection on ways to rethink organisational work, using East Asian models by default. In 2024, we submitted a long essay on How Things Happen (publication TBD), and are currently reflecting on the roles of superficial conformism and deep consensus in organisational coherence.

Looking for common ground - public talks and workshops

I have been invited to present at numerous forums on topics related to this portfolio. Among others, I spoke about global catastrophic risk at a global citizenship forum organised by Asia Education Foundation in 2017 and at the 2017 Australian Effective Altruism Conference. I spoke about the multilingual Internet at the 2014 Fondapol event 'Le Progrès c'est nous' in Paris and at the 2014 Melbourne Writers Festival, and offered a journey through digital China as part of the 2014 Sydney Ideas program. I spoke about the future of language education at the 2017 Melbourne Bastille Day, 2016 Language Con at NYU Shanghai, and in 2016 at the Australian Defence Forces School of Languages. I spoke about looking for common ground at Writing + Concept 2017, explored systems change and digital transformation at the 2021 Humanitarian Leadership conference, and presented on intercultural empathy as a preamble to the inaugural 2020 Future Law Virtual Summit.

My facilitation toolbox - things I use and like

We stand on the shoulders of giants. Below is a short selection of great tools, all available online.

• Liberating structures

• Feminist co-leadership toolkit

• Development, Impact & You tookit

• Community weaving

• Systems archetypes

• Planetary boundaries

• 36 dramatic situations

• Brand archetypes

• Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies

• The Decider App

Design for Diversity – hacking intercultural innovation

Diversity breeds innovation, they say. But how can you foster effective collaboration among people who don’t share a native language, or the same cultural default settings?

Design for Diversity is a facilitated hackathon model with-a-twist. This one-day program uses a human-centered design framework to create a learning and social environment where participants from different languages and cultures experience their potential as key agents of change. Unlike competitive, pitch focused hackathons, this program optimises for creative exploration, open collaboration, and iterative prototyping. I have run this program in high schools, with international students, and with the public as part of Melbourne Knowledge Week.

Mourning rituals - grieving the 2020 that wasn’t

There is no change without grief. New structures, no matter how good, involve the passing of existing ones. All conscious innovators must inquire how we can accept loss and find new meaning from it, individually and as a group? Not to mention, any venture somehow engaging with the metacrisis unfolds against a background of much destruction.

‘Grieving Rituals for the 2020 that wasn’t’ gathered a diverse group to explore this question creatively. I worked with Helen Palmer to develop and trial new rituals to acknowledge and overcome loss, and develop a deeper understanding of our grief for the year that was and was not. By the end, not only did the group experience better connection to themselves and their feelings for 2020 but also developed greater appreciation for rituals. Reflections on this experiment were captured in a podcast series.

Default Settings - exploring polyphonic storytelling

Digital environments offer great opportunities for community building beyond usual boundaries - if only because they are natively global. But how can you bring together audiences with diverse languages and cultural expectations for fruitful experiences? Default settings was an experimental creative project exploring questions of reflectivity, discourse, polyphony and audience agency. We invited a digital audience and a small cast of diverse associate storytellers to reflect on the various intersecting story-worlds that they inhabit, and stretch their capacity to create a common world by interweaving different stories, stemming from different traditions.

MARCO POLO TRANSLATION CLUB - TRANSFORMATIVE PEER-LEARNING

Marco Polo Translation Club is a global movement exploring collaborative translation as a way to build peer-learning communities that nurture self-awareness and trigger deep mutual understanding. From 2017 to 2023, Translation Club ran as a weekly event in Melbourne and Tokyo, with additional pop ups across Europe, Asia and North America. Translation Club also inspired a pilot project supported by Vic Health, using collaborative translation improve mental health among Romanian and Nepali communities. Our events are currently on pause - please contact me if you would like to run a pop up, or hear more about the model.

Culture Flip - SOCIAL CUES FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING

How could we do language exchange better? In 2018-2019, I led a small project called ‘Culture flip’ to address this question. The Culture Flip cards present six archetypes, each with a light and dark side, representing the different ways we tend to behave in social settings. They were designed to support self-awareness and goal setting, in order to help language learners connect and communicate better at language exchange events. They can also be used more broadly by teachers and facilitators to support original self-awareness and communication activities. You can download the full set of cards here.

Marco Polo Handbook - crosSCultural Facilitation

Team building, peer-learning, networking events, and any community-based design, all depend on good facilitation. There are excellent frameworks and activities out there, from human-centered design to liberating structures, but most don’t consider the challenges of engaging groups that don’t share the same culture or language.

In 2015, I brought together a group of facilitators as part of the ‘Marco Polo Project co-lab’ to explore new ways of facilitating intercultural engagement. Together, we produced the Marco Polo Handbook: a facilitator’s toolbox explicitly designed with a diverse group in mind.